His Conquering Sword (67 page)

He was alone in the middle of a great khaja city. Yet he was not lost. He knew exactly how to make his way back to Diana’s tent—to her flat. So it was possible physically to explore. Now he must learn the khaja language. Although from all he had seen, he wondered if he would ever understand them. They seemed completely indifferent to his foreign-ness. They carried hand-sized thin slates called modelers, or computers, with them everywhere as if they were holy charms. But it was the total absence of weapons that puzzled him most, as if they either knew nothing of weapons or were prohibited from carrying them, and Anatoly knew very well that only khaja
slaves
or the lowliest jaran servants were forbidden to carry weapons.

Coming out from underneath a bridge that spanned the river with massive grace, he saw a great bridge that looked like a fortress. And there, closer, almost beneath its feet, stood a real fortress.

The river shouldered up against a wharf and bled into the moat that surrounded the castle’s outer walls. He stopped dead and examined it. Here stood something he understood.

He ventured out along the wharf. Water lapped at an arched gate set into the wall below, but a bridge led him across the greenish moat waters which smelled of dense rotting vegetation. Walls enclosed him. Passing through an inner archway, he found himself on a broad green lawn shaded by trees. In the middle of this ward stood a white-bricked tower capped with a rounded turret at each corner. Like any citadel, it looked imposing. Wooden stairs led up, and openly, into the tower. Why would they build such a thing and yet let people pass in and out so freely? Here and there on the grounds he marked uniformed men, dressed in brilliant red and gold or somber black and red, who stood with the posture of soldiers, but they carried no weapons, although one of them held a burnished black staff.

Anatoly wove in and out among other people who seemed, like him, merely to be looking. He followed a clump of them up the stairs, and suddenly he came into a cluster of rooms where he felt, at last, at home. Armor and weapons stood displayed along the walls. He knew better than to touch anything. Yet just the sight of it eased his worries. These khaja knew and understood war, that much was obvious. He understood vaguely from things Diana and the Prince of Jeds (no longer the prince, but still alive) had said to him that there were people, not human people but
zayinu
, the ancient ones, who ruled Diana’s people. Diana called them
aliens
; the Prince called them Chapalii. Perhaps these Chapalii had forced the humans to lay aside their weapons—it would make sense, if they had conquered them—but let them keep a few here for some strange zayinu reason.

It was dusk by the time he went back outside, pondering all that he had seen. Glowing lanterns without flame lit the streets, so it was no trouble to find his way back, although by the time he turned the corner onto Kensington Court Place his legs ached from so much walking. A man ought not to walk so far. He ought to ride.

He placed his palm on the panel, and as the door opened he heard her voice and then her feet pounding down the steps.

“Anatoly!” Diana jerked to a halt at the base of the steps. He stilled, watching her. Her expression passed from fear to relief and straight into anger. “Where were you?” she demanded.

At the door above, Ilyana peeked out.

Anatoly brushed carefully by Diana and took the steps at a dignified pace up past Ilyana and on to their own flat. Another actor, Hal, lived here also, but he had gone to stay with a friend for the month, to give them privacy. Diana practically trod on his heels following him up.

“I was terrified!” she yelled at him even before the door shut behind her. “How dare you go out like that on your own! You could have gotten lost! Anything could have happened!”

He went all the way forward to the sitting room, to the window, and laid a hand on the cool glass, staring down at the lamplit street below. He felt… satisfied. Fuming, she stood behind him.

Finally, he turned. “But I did not get lost. And why should I not go out? Is there some law that prevents me?”

“No, but—”

“Then I don’t understand why you are angry,” he added, understanding full well. “Unless you want me never to do anything on my own.”

Her blue eyes shone even brighter, sparkling with unshed tears. She made a face, grimacing, and looked wretched, and for an instant he felt guilty, making her feel this bad, but restrained himself, knowing that to hesitate in attack is always fatal.

“Oh, Anatoly,” she said, throwing her arms around him. “I was so worried.”

Anatoly decided it wouldn’t hurt his cause to embrace her back.

“What are we going to do with you?” she murmured into his ear. Unlike so much of her world, Diana was solid; she had weight. She had warmth. But he said nothing, just held her. After a bit she pushed away from him, sniffed once, and regarded him pensively. She had tied her hair back with a ribbon, and he reached up and unbound it, liking it better when it flowed around her face and along her shoulders. She hesitated, then went on. “Yevgeni Usova thinks he can get you work at the cobbler shop.”

“I think not!” he retorted. “A prince of the Sakhalin does not make boots for other people. And certainly not side by side with an arenabekh, and a lover of men, at that.”

“Anatoly! That is one thing you will not say in my tent. Do you understand?”

“Yes, my wife,” he said meekly.

She sighed and folded her arms on her chest. “I don’t know what to do with you.”

But he already had some ideas. “Do you khaja mean to go to war with the zayinu, the Chapalii?” he asked. She started, looking guilty, but did not answer. “Did the Prince of Jeds—not Tess Soerensen, but her brother—not give up Jeds in order to come here to fight the Chapalii?”

She shrugged. “We want our freedom, it’s true.”

“Well, then, I’m trained to fight. Why shouldn’t I offer my services to Charles Soerensen?”

Diana sighed and rested a hand on his sleeve and stared out at London, at the gently glowing streetlamps, at the steady light glimmering through windows, at the distant lambent glow above the rooftops of a million more lights of the vast khaja city. “The way we will train to fight and the way the jaran fight, well, Anatoly, they aren’t very alike any more.”

But her words heartened him. She was a Singer, an artist, touched by the gods to perform her art. But as much more as she knew of this art called acting, he knew of war. He had seen the khaja weapons. They looked the same. Even supposing they had other weapons, ones that weren’t solid, that didn’t have weight, still, he could learn to use them. And if, as slaves, these khaja had not used weapons in a long time, then they would need a person trained as a soldier.

Every campaign must have an objective. Bakhtiian and Charles Soerensen had an alliance of some sort. Soerensen had told him as much. Just as Anatoly had gone ahead into Habakar territory, hunting down the Habakar king and gathering intelligence for the army, now here, too, he would act as Bakhtiian’s scout, as the vanguard of Bakhtiian’s army in alliance with Charles Soerensen in his revolt against humanity’s alien masters.

S
ONIA HAD A NEW
loom. She had strung the warp, taut vertical lines of coarse thread that striped the distant horizon and the lightening expanse of the sky. Seen through the warp, the rolling hills and endless grass of the southern plains did not look fractured but rather like a promise of the weaving to come. As she did with every new weaving, Sonia had sited the loom so that the weaver and the unadorned warp faced east, to catch the rising of Mother Sun.

Tess Soerensen watched as the sun rose, splintering its glory into the yarn. The grass turned gold. A wandering river, twisting and turning through the land like a child’s careless loops, flooded with gold briefly before shading to a humbler tone of murky blue. In the distance, a solitary rider approached camp at a gallop, eerie for the sight as yet untouched with sound. The quiet that permeated these vast plains was in itself a kind of sound, a note of expectation combined with a deep abiding peace. Although, Tess reflected, perhaps what people heard as peace was only nature’s monumental indifference to the tides of history that rose and fell on its shores.

Sonia poured a cupful of milk onto the ground and threw a handful of earth into the air, where the wind caught it for an instant before it sprayed in a hundred hissing droplets into the grass. Then she took her shuttle out of its case and knelt to begin the weaving. Tess sat beside her, helping when necessary.

“In the long ago time,” Sonia began, telling a story to help pass the time as she threaded the weft through the warp, beating it down, “a pregnant woman began to weave a blanket for her unborn child. And as she wove, she pulled down threads of moonlight and sunlight, threads of the wind and threads of river water and of earth, and patterned the blanket as her child’s life, as she wanted her child’s life to become. But soon enough she was no longer content just to weave the new child’s life but began to weave the lives of all of her children and of her husband and her sisters and mother and father and aunts and uncles and at last of her entire tribe. And because such a blanket can never be finished, the child could not be born.”

Tess listened distractedly. In the end, after many trials, the weaver’s ancient grandmother had to unravel the weaving for her, and thus was the child delivered, to live its own life.

Tess felt like that weaver. With a net of invisible threads, she wove the destiny of the jaran. Her loom had no substance, except perhaps for the implant embedded in her cranium that allowed her access to a vast network of information and structural ramparts on which and out of which she could build the matrix—weave the pattern—that had become her task. Her warp, strong and straight, was the tribes of the jaran. Across it she wove the strands of human space, of the Chapalii Empire, of the rebellion against the Empire that Tess’s brother even now laid the groundwork for, of the infinite twists and turns any event might take as it became part of the texture.

But she could never be sure that what she was doing was right.

“You’re quiet,” said Sonia.

“Unquiet,” retorted Tess, “in my heart.”

Sonia smiled without faltering as she wove. “My sister, you think too much. You must accept the task the gods have given you to do, and then do it.”

They had had this conversation a hundred times before over the twelve years they had known one another. No doubt they would repeat it a thousand times more in the years to come. But Sonia knew only part of the truth.

The threads of starlight Tess used in the weave were invisible to the jaran. She kept them that way. She had devised a complicated web that concealed and revealed the true nature of her life, her origins, her purpose here, in alternating strands, so that no one strand was so weak, foundering on half-truths, that it might break and thus collapse the entire fragile edifice.

Strand One (revealed): Tess Soerensen was the sister of Charles Soerensen, formerly Prince of Jeds, a flourishing city-state far to the southwest of the plains, and now a fugitive in his mother’s country of “Erthe,” far across the seas. Having given up his princely seat, Charles had gone to fight against the Empire that had conquered and subjugated Erthe, hoping in time to free his mother’s land from the Chapalii yoke.

Strand Two (concealed): Earth was not a country far across the seas, but a planet orbiting a distant star, up in the heavens. Far from giving up any pretense to power, Charles had indeed passed the princedom of Jeds into Tess’s hands, but only to resume with full force the dukedom granted him by the same conquering Chapalii.

Strand Three (revealed): The Chapalii were not human. They were
zayinu
, the ancient ones.

Strand Four (concealed): The Chapalii were aliens. Their interstellar Empire had swallowed Earth and her sister planets a hundred years before, bringing a period of peace and stability and a number of technological advances to the mostly human population of the amalgam of planets known as the League. But Earth and the League were subject states. They were not free.

Strand Five (revealed): Charles Soerensen meant to lead a rebellion against the Chapalii Empire, and so Tess (as Prince of Jeds) had allied herself with Ilyakoria Bakhtiian, the leader of the united jaran tribes.

Strand Six (concealed): The jaran, Jeds, the lands the jaran had already conquered, all lay on an interdicted planet called Rhui, in the Delta Pavonis system. Charles needed the mostly untapped resources of Rhui for his rebellion. To this end, he and Tess had agreed to do what they could to aid the jaran in uniting as much of the western continent of Rhui under one authority—jaran authority—as possible, so that when they needed the resources of Rhui a decade or a century from now, these resources could be swiftly commandeered.

Strand Seven (revealed): Tess was married to Ilya Bakhtiian.

Strand Eight (concealed): Well, she really was married to him. That had happened before the rest of the plan sprang to life. But she had concealed her true origins from him. He didn’t know she came from another planet. He didn’t even know that
he
lived on a planet, much less that there
were
other planets with other life or that the universe existed on any but an abstract, philosophical scale even as it rested within the hands of the gods themselves.

By what right did she keep from him, from Sonia, from all of them, knowledge of the stars? She could list the rationales easily enough, one, two, three:

If she hadn’t come here, accidentally, in the first place, they would never have known or suspected anyway; their technology was medieval and their mind-set, however flexible, however laudable in many ways, was primitive.

If Ilya, the greatest leader his people had ever known, knew the truth and how inconsequential it made the vision that had driven him, even before Tess had arrived, to unite the jaran and begin his conquest of khaja—of settled—lands, it would destroy him; it would cut out his heart.